After being the big dog of
search engines for more than a decade, Google has decided to change its
corporate moniker to Alphabet. After 17 years of building a $400 billion business
that controls everything from the world's most popular search engine (Google)
to the world's most popular video portal (YouTube), to life extension research
firm (Calico), to self-driving car developer and a host of other acquisitions,
Larry Page and Sergey Brin have decided to rename their enterprise. Add
to that the fact that CEO Page has turned the reins of Google over to Sundar
Pinchai, and many people both in the Internet and on the stock market are
wondering what's going to happen next. Even before the soup has cooled,
rumors are swirling that Google is interested in acquiring yet more companies,
including everything from Twitter to a company that makes pocket toy
satellites. So if you are wondering if Google intends to make Alphabet
Soup of their company, let’s give the pot a stir.

You’ve got to hand it to Brin
and Page. Ever since they went public in
2004, they have spent their money wisely, although in several cases it didn’t initially
look that way. Remember when they
acquired YouTube for a whopping $1.67 billion in 2006? At the time, a number of pundits thought the
deal was questionable at best, being that the fledgling video portal’s only
assets were hundreds of thousands of homemade videos and 67 employees. YouTube had yet to turn a profit and it was
questionable whether it ever would. This
was especially poignant since a number of media moguls were threatening the
company with copyright-infringement lawsuits. But Brin and Page soldiered on,
betting that the public was sure to migrate from TV to online video. Today, YouTube streams more than 4 billion
videos per day, dwarfing the combined output of all the TV stations on the
planet. That’s the good news. The bad news is that in 2014, even with $4
billion in revenues generated (according to the Wall Street Journal), YouTube
still stubbornly refused to post a profit.
Still, I doubt it gave the gurus at Google any sleepless nights, since
YouTube only represented 6% of the company’s sales last year. Besides, Google seems to revel in betting on
longshots.

AI is all the rage these
days. Everything from autonomous aerial
vehicles to self-driving automobiles relies on artificial intelligence. There are even experiments in search engine
technology powered by AI. With that in
mind, Google acquired AI startup DeepMind for $500 million. What they plan on
doing with the technology is anyone’s guess.
The company’s website Says that “DeepMind is a cutting edge artificial
intelligence company” to build general-purpose learning algorithms for
simulations, e-commerce, and games.
While a number of scientific luminaries, including Stephen Hawking has
warned that the creation of artificial intelligence could spell the extinction
of the human race, Google’s past experiments with turning AI loose online had
decidedly non-life threatening implications.
Earlier this year when Google trained an artificially intelligent
network to view photos, the most terrifying thing it did was transmogrify
images based upon the tasks it was asked to perform. For instance, when researchers asked the
system what it thought dumbbells looked like, the system created an image that
looked like a human arm attached to one.
There were also bizarre transpositions of animal heads on humans and
embedded in clouds. Read
more about it here in this article from the daily main.

B is for Boston Dynamics

Snap Quiz: What looks like an
extra from Star Wars, sounds like a chainsaw, and walks like a Great Dane? The answer is BigDog, the quadrupedal robot
being built by Boston Robotics for DARPA.
Designed to carry more than 300
pounds of gear over rubble, up mountains and through snow and mud, this robot
is intended to tote gear for soldiers in the field. Of course, until the company comes up with a
quieter source of locomotion other than what sounds like a 2-stroke engine,
this is one doggie that won’t be sneaking up on anybody. Still, when you consider the technology in
BigDog, including stereo vision, LIDAR, gyroscopic stabilization and the
ability to climb 35 degree slopes fully laden, maybe if the technology doesn’t
work out for the DoD, it can be retrofitted for the US Post Office.

BigDog is only one of nine robots on the Boston Dynamics website.
Others include a bipedal humanoid robot named Atlas that competed in the DARPA
Robotic Challenge. Designed for rescue,
as well as to enter danger zones where humans fear to tread, Atlas can walk,
climb stairs, turn valves, move debris, and even drive a rescue vehicle. While his utility can’t be beat, what he
gains in mobility he more than gives back in the looks department. Let me put it this way, if you saw him coming
to your rescue, you’d probably die of fright.
Speaking of death, this brings us to the next letter in the Google
Alphabet.

Can Calico Cure Death?

Can you a blame billionaires
for trying to live forever? Historically
speaking, this isn’t a new concept.
Everyone from the first sovereign emperor of China to Conquistador Ponce
De Leon have sought immortality. The
difference is that with today’s state-of-the-art biomedical research, it just
might be possible. Consider if you will
that only a few years ago, transplantation was considered the creation of Dr.
Frankenstein. Now it is
commonplace. With advances in everything
from prosthetics to genetic technology, making life extension a reality isn’t
such a stretch. Still, some people think
Larry Page and Sergey Brin have gone off the deep end on this one. But
with a war chest of $45 billion at the ready, if anyone can take a crack at the
Grim Reaper, it's Google. Only time and a few billion dollars will tell. (If
that doesn’t work, maybe they can figure out a way to transport their mind to a
robot like Atlas.)

Alphabet will also manage and
develop a number of technology gizmos.
Everything from diabetes detecting contact lenses, to a 360 degree
virtual reality camera, a solar powered drone startup (Titan Aerospace), a
delivery drone called Project Wing, to energy harvesting turbine powered kite
called Makani are under development.
There is also a high altitude balloon named Project Loon that purports
to be able to provide internet access to people living in remote areas, and
Nest, a company devoted to creating smart home products. Last but not least is Skybox Imaging, another
$500 million acquisition that builds microsatellites.

With enough created and
acquired companies under management to literally cover every letter in the
alphabet, is it any wonder that Google decided to take the name Alphabet for
its corporate umbrella? Ever since
returning to the CEO spot at Google in 2011, Larry Page has wrestled with the
best way to control his sprawling business empire. The problem for this dyed-in-the-wool
entrepreneur is that his priorities were becoming divided. A quote from Mashable sums it up best:

"Larry was always more
excited about big vision projects than the day-to-day grind of running the
company," says Bruno Bowden, who helped build Google Earth. "This
structure makes those projects and his role far more visible. Wall Street will
only care about Google proper and how Sundar is doing. For Larry, this gives
him the chance to focus on a broader mandate as he always wanted."

Y is for Why Now?

Although restructuring the
growing Google empire is something that many see as inevitable, the question of
timing is something that has many scratching their head. As for whether the name change will hurt or
help is something that only time will tell.
From an institutional perspective the announcement of the new name
actually caused company stock to jump by 4% the very next week. As Alphabet
(nee Google) continues to grow through acquisition, the question is whether
changing the name of the parent company will prove a boon to the brand or
whether Google will ultimately wind up making alphabet soup out of its
conglomerate.

In this article I have discussed how and
possibly why Google has decided to changed its corporate name to alphabet and how this well effect Googles empire as a
whole. I go on to list many of Alphabets many corporate entities (alphabetically
of course) that they has swallowed over the years and shared many of the
interesting projects these divisions are bringing to fruition.

If you feel your business could use some help with its marketing, contact us at 904-410-2091,We will provide a free marketing analysis to help you get better results. Don't forget to Plus us on Goole+ as well.If you'd like a free copy of our eBook,
"Internet Marketing Tips for the 21st Century," please fill in the
form below and we will give you immediate access to it. Your information is
always kept private and is never sold.

Does the
public’s uncontrollable appetite for free smartphone apps also make you
vulnerable? Right now there are approximately 4,000,000 apps combined that are
available in the top four app stores. Are these apps being checked before being
released to the public? Are we vulnerable as users by downloading free apps on
our smart phones? Could we be compromising our security and financial
information by using these apps? In this episode you will learn the truth about
using free apps, how to stay safe, and what to look for when deciding “to get
an app for that”. So stay tuned and turn onto this week’s Working The Web To
Win and learn “how to safely whet your appetite” for smart phone apps.

As far back as the 19th century, when the telegraph
came into vogue, people have been looking for a better way to deliver
information and goods more efficiently than the US Postal Service. Today's
wired world has created a myriad of electronic delivery systems that do
everything from rendering payment, to delivering messages and even packages at
the click of a mouse. In today’s blog, I intend to delve into a number of
innovative, cost effective delivery options to the USPS, as well as the
possibility that in the near future the post office could very well be as dead
as the dodo bird.

The US Postal Service can
trace its roots back to the Second Continental Congress in 1775. That’s when Ben Franklin, a prominent
Philadelphia printer, was appointed as the country’s first Postmaster
General. Since that momentous occasion,
the USPS staff has mushroomed to 717,254 federal employees, making it one of
the nation’s largest employers. In 2014,
the USPS generated $67.8 billion in revenues.
That sounds impressive until you realize that it represented a $5.5
billion operating loss. This seems odd
when you consider the USPS operates a virtual monopoly when it comes to
delivering letters. Stranger still is
the fact that the post office has downsized considerably during the past few
years, closing a number of offices as well as reducing the hours they are
open. Of course, the USPS is and always
has been a bureaucracy. That explains a
lot.

The real problem with the
Post Office is that unlike the 19th and first half of the 20th
century where it had little if any competition, by the latter part of the 20th
century when package and overnight delivery was privatized, the days of the
Post Office monopoly was over. But the USPS was still alive and kicking, if at
a snail’s pace. (They don’t call it snail mail for nothing.) Sure, since the late 1800’s people could use
the telegraph and telegram to send messages quickly. But when one considered the fact that Western
Union charged by the word, the telegram was more like Twitter than traditional correspondence. Short copy was the norm. Then came the Internet.

We Don’t Need No Stinking Postage

By the mid 1990’s, digital technology
such as fax and email began to slowly but surely erode the postal service’s
hegemony. Why wait days to deliver the
message when anyone with a phone and a modem could send pages replete with
photos across the telephone wires in minutes.
(Today we can do this in seconds, but remember how slow dialup
connections once were.)

Suddenly you didn’t need to
pay for postage to send letters, flyers and ad copy across town or around the
world. (Spam was born.) All it took was
type, point and click. Add to this the
fact that within the past few years, most businesses and banks have adopted
electronic payment systems that allow customers to remit payment at the click
of a mouse and it makes the USPS seem a lot like its predecessor, the Pony
Express.

Yet the Post Office still
plods on. A number of tech companies such as Netflix still rely on the USPS to
ship their products, as do a myriad of other advertisers, many of which we
regard as junk mail. However, as competition
grows and technology makes much of what the USPS does seem redundant, will
there come a time when the public, not to mention the federal government
decides it’s time to put the Postal Service out of its misery? A quote from Wikipedia sums it up nicely:

"Since the 2006 all-time peak mail volume,[5]after which Congress passed thePostal
Accountability and Enhancement Act,[6](which mandated $5.5 billion per year to be paid into an
account to fully prefund employee retirement health benefits, a requirement
exceeding that of other government and private organizations[7]), revenue dropped sharply due to
recession-influenced[8]declining mail volume,[9]prompting the postal service to look to other sources of
revenue while cutting costs to reduce its budget deficit.[10]The USPS lost US$5.5 billion in fiscal 2014, and its revenue
was US$67.8 billion."

Whoa Nelly! I can hear those
telegraph operators of yesteryear crying the blues. Not only have private shipping concerns such
as UPS and FedEx continued to chip away at USPS market share, but other major
players such as Amazon want in on the action. (Can you say same-day drone delivery?) Being that neither timeliness nor
cost-effectiveness has never been one of the Post Office’s priorities, as
innovative companies continue to reel in more and more of the fish that USPS
once had all to itself, at what point will the feds declare it time to abandon
ship?

“Amazon delivery drones are still years away, but someday they
will be as common as seeing a mail truck. Bezos told the Telegraph in London
that the biggest hurdle Prime Air has to clear isn’t related to technology, but
regulators.”

Of course, with other
bureaucrats such as the FAA, running interference for the Post Office, they
might be able to delay the inevitable for a time.And since the US Postal Service has never
been one to innovate since Ben Franklin stepped down from office, far from
looking for new sources of revenue, it will face an ever shrinking customer
base.Combined with bureaucratic bloat
and an unwillingness to face the fiscal realities of running a business, the
sheer cost of running a dysfunctional shipping conglomerate will inevitably
spell disaster. (Or, they can simply print an adhesive
strip on the back of a $1 bill.)As with
other bygone technologies, the question is not whether the Post Office can
survive change, but when will it be time to Fire the Postman?

In this article I have discussed the US Postal Service and how thismassive governmentalbureaucracy is not only losing money, it is losing ground as a mail deliver system. The massive losses are causing the public and congress to rethink the USPS's role and whether it should be privatized.

If you'd like a free copy of our eBook, "Internet Marketing Tips for the 21st Century," please fill in the form below and we will give you immediate access to it. Your information is always kept private and is never sold.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

By Hector Cisneros

Ready or not, Windows 10 is finally here. We all know that
Windows 8 was a bust. Its ill conceived design, cost Microsoft in a big way. Windows
8 was so bad that Microsoft had to re-release Windows 7 on new PC’s, even after
it had withdrawn version 7 from the market.
I am sure that Microsoft even had to back burner other initiatives while
they hurried to fix this problem. So why should you look at Windows 10? Why place
trust in Microsoft? Why not switch to Apple IOS of Google Chrome? Even the way Microsoft released their new operating
system gave cause for alarm by sneaking it in as an update that showed up on your
“Task Bar” displaying a Windows symbol! In
this article we will explore our first impression of Windows 10, uncensored. We’ll
look at the “good, the bad and the ugly” of what we have found and pass that information
on to you, our loyal readers. So let’s get started.

As healthcare grows ever more
expensive and complicated, more and more people are turning to the Internet for
everything from diagnosis to treatment options.
More telling still is the fact that doctors are also using the web for everything
from consultation to telesurgery. Even computer
giant IBM has anted up, retooling their Jeopardy winning Watson computer into Dr.
Watson the diagnostician. For those of us
who lead active lives, not to mention the mobility impaired, turning to the doc
in the “eBox” can not only save time, but lives.

Is putting the e in the doc’s inbox, helping or hurting
Americans?

Whether it’s to order non-prescription
drugs, diagnose what ails us, or get the lowdown on practitioners, the web is rapidly
becoming to go to resource for medical issues.
With malpractice in this country at an all-time high, who can blame the public
for doing their homework online? The problem
for physicians is that while they have a medical degree, patients and parents do
not.

From a special report aired
by TV stationWVVA entitled: E-medicine, helping or hurting?

"We have a lot of patients who have done their
homework. They have concerns. They've done the research and when they come in, they
have solid information and questions. Very often, the patient may be right. They
may say, I'm worried my child has this, and sometimes, they're dead on," said
Rainbow Pediatrics physician John Fernald.

But sometimes, they're dead wrong. The most common
mistake Fernald sees are patients who quit necessary medications after reading about
a rare side effect. "Every patient is different. And for your child, the benefits
may very well outweigh the risks."

The report goes on to state that while 60% of
Americans now use the Internet for self-diagnosis, 40% never follow up with a
trip to the doctor’s office. This can
lead to misdiagnosis, mistreatment, complications and possibly death.

Not What the
Doctor Ordered

Even worse is the public proclivity to order
pharmaceuticals online. While taking the
wrong medication is dangerous enough, the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy (NABP) reports that thousands of websites distribute illegal or even
counterfeit drugs. A press release on
PRWire reported that;

NABP has reviewed
over 11,000 Internet drug outlets, finding that 96.13% of the sites reviewed operate
out of compliance with US pharmacy laws and practice standards, and identifying
these sites as "Not Recommended." Approximately 85% of Not Recommended
sites are selling prescription drugs without requiring a valid prescription. Nearly
50%, offer drugs that are either foreign, or not approved by the US Food and Drug
Administration. Further, of the 10,588 Not Recommended sites, 87% can be traced
to affiliate networks of rogue Internet drug outlets.

If you have
ever ordered a drug online, what you need to ask yourself is whether you are absolutely
certain that what you received in the mail was what you paid for. The US along with Great Britain and China have recently cracked down on Internet “drugstores” that were selling everything from
fake weight loss pills to bogus cancer drugs. A sweep by Interpol netted 156 arrests
in 115 countries, which resulted in a whopping 51 million Euros worth of fake pharmaceuticals
being confiscated. Interpol reported that organized criminal networks were switching
from dealing in illicit drugs to manufacturing and distributing fake pharma, since
the penalties are far less if they are caught and the profits are as good or better.

Return of the House Call

That being said, legitimate medical practitioners
are taking advantage of a number of niches being created by the Internet. A number of physicians, nurses and other medical
professional are embracing the Home Health movement, offering everything from in-home
therapy and treatment to the return of the house call. Many large metropolitan areas around the country
have physicians that offer in-home care.
After Googling “House Calls Jacksonville, FL,” I found a handful of practitioners,
including one called Little Black Bag Medical.
Their homepage offers the following:

Although it may seem anachronistic,
physicians seeing sick patients in their homes is quite natural. It was only
in the past 50 years with increasing large pieces of technology and insurance pressures
on physicians to see more patients that house call medicine disappeared.
Now, thanks to miniaturization of technology and increasing desire of
patients to have more meaningful time and relationship with their doctors,House Calls are back. http://www.littleblackbagmed.com/

Not only is home healthcare more convenient for people who lead busy lives, the elderly and the mobility challenged, it’s a highly profitable business for those who practice it. In an April 2013 report by ABC News titled, “Boom predicted for At-Home Industry,” it was reported that,

The BLS'sOccupational Outlook Handbooksays the median yearly pay for home health and personal care aides
is $20,170 ($9.70 an hour). That's less than the rate for other personal care and
service workers ($20,420) and well below the median for all occupations ($33,840). But though
the pay may be low, so are the barriers to entry: a starting job requires "less
than high school," says the Handbook.

The report goes on to say that by 2020, the ranks of home healthcare workers is expected to swell by more than 1.3 million. That’s the good news. The bad news is that Medicare typically picks up none of home healthcare expenses and Medicaid only picks up some, providing that the provider is Medicaid certified. However the added out-of-pocket expense has to be taken with a grain of salt. According to ABC News, while the cost of having a part-time home healthcare worker can average $18,000 per annum, the typical cost for full-time nursing home care runs $70,000 per year or more. That doesn’t mean that other major players aren’t itching to get into the healthcare business. The birth of the Internet of Things (IoT) is already a multibillion dollar industry with everything from medical devices to wearables that monitor vital signs. According to Dr. Safavi of Accenture, “

“The technology that allows us to sense the human
body is being used in two ways. Part of it is for general fitness and awareness
and part of it is really deeply connected to biological care.

“For example,
there is a very specific electronic device that is put on a pill and when you ingest
it the digestion sets off a small wave that allows you to know the pill has been
ingested. That is used to monitor patients with serious conditions to figure out
if they are taking their medicine.

More to
the point, where much of modern medicine is concerned with treating illness, IoT
devices are being used by the public to stay healthy and avoid winding up in either
the doctor’s office or the hospital. Today’s
healthcare practitioners, including those who labor in hospitals are using Internet
technology to remotely monitor and in some cases treat their patients.

Is There a Doctor in the Mouse?

Even more
incredible is the fact that a doctor can be a dozen, hundreds or even thousands
of miles away, and still be called upon to diagnose disease with new Telepresence
devices such as the TouchHealthRP-71 Telepresence robot pictured below.

Unlike typical videoconference screens, the RP-71provides physicians with mobility enough to make the rounds at a busy clinic or
hospital. Even better is the fact that patients
can see, hear and interact with the doctor.
This allows physicians to work at a number of far flung locations during
the same day. Until recently, organizations
like Doctors Without Borders were the only way in which many people in the Third
World could receive advanced medical care.
This necessitated a number of physicians to uproot themselves to fly onto
foreign and sometimes hostile shores in order to treat patients. With advances in Telepresence and telesurgery
robots it is now possible for US doctors to diagnose, treat and if necessary operate
on patients around the world without having to leave town.

Recently, a new class of artificially intelligent
computer has begun assisting doctors in diagnosing disease. IBM’s Watson, famous for beating the world’s best
human players on the game show Jeopardy, has been repurposed to serve the healthcare
industry. In a July 30 blog by CIO Today entitled, “Dr. Watson Will See You Now,” Watson is being re-tasked to assist healthcare
professionals and insurance providers to better diagnose and treat chronic disease.
What gives Watson a technological leg up is that unlike humans, he has the capability
of sorting through and comparing millions of pieces of data in order to arrive at
a clinical decision. Also, unlike human clinicians,
Watson is cloud-based, which means that he, unlike busy pathologists is available
24/7 anywhere in the world he is needed.

Of course, with every technological advantage
there is a complimentary disadvantage. Like
any other computer-based system, Watson, as well as telesurgery and Telepresence
robots, along with web-enabled medical devices such as patient monitors, surgical
devices and defibrillators are subject to hacking. As far back as 2013 the FDA issued warnings tomedical device makers to beef up their cybersecurity.

Love it or hate it, the Internet has become an
integral part of modern healthcare. With the costs of healthcare rising much faster
than wages, technology might just be the shot in the arm that will make medical
care available to one and all. Either way,
just like the mythical genie of lore, once out of the bottle it will be all but
impossible to put the “eDoc” back in the box.

In this article I have discussed how telemedicine
is changing the way healthcare is being deliver in the US and around the world.
New developments in remote medical monitoring, devices and software are having a
positive impact helping lower medical care cost. Like all technologies, these are
double edged swords, they can help to cut cost but also bringing vulnerabilities
as well. Even the use of AI software like Dr. Watson is proving to be a big help.
The future of Telemedicine is changing rapidly and will have long term implications
that cannot be undone.

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By Hector Cisneros I have been actively networking in a number of organizations since the early 1980’s. My experience, tells me that most...

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